چرا آمريکا به مولانای افغان ها نياز دارد !!؟؟

Perhaps it is somewhat surprising then that one of America's most widely read and best selling poets has been a devout Muslim mystic born eight centuries ago in Afghanistan ? Maulana Jelaluddin Rumi. His verses in praise of Allah were set to music by Madonna; Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as background to her fashion shows. A two year old Time magazine article heralds the rise of Rumi's popularity with American readers in the tenuous aftermath of September 11, when Harper Collins published a pricey hardback entitled The Soul of Rumi, 400 pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks, to follow up its previous best seller, The Essential Rumi, published in 1995 with more than 250,000 copies in print. In the currently deteriorating relations between America and Islamic constituents, the words of an ancient Muslim mystic as having captured the hearts of so many Americans might seem a total aberration or imply some hidden logic of hope and renewal.

Americanizing Rumi

It is arguable that Rumi's popularity in the US has been stripped of its linguistic and religious integrity and Americanized to accommodate a spiritual Starbucks of mass consumption. But an American Rumi who speaks to the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people and builds bridges of understanding between Islam and the West is, after all, better than a defunct national media incapable of projecting a balanced perspective of the Muslim world and certainly more effective than the official rhetoric of good vs. evil, the evil being undoubtedly the "Islamist threat" that kept Yusuf Islam off US shores. A lover of irony, Rumi would have groaned knowingly at such an absurdity. He certainly would have appreciated the confluence of spiritual hunger and terrorist alerts that keeps his pages turning in America.

Maliha Masood is a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is the author of an upcoming travelogue on the Middle East to be published by Cune Press in 2005 and the co-producer of a documentary film on American-Muslim women. She currently resides in Seattle, WA.here find the whole article ...